(Re-) capturing the novel.

Abstract

We can help students (re-) capture the power and wonder of the novel by simultaneously involving them in numerous explications of text and in a mode of scholarship seldom seen today--a present state of studies--that needs merely to focus in an abbreviated manner on one of the most fundamental aspects of the genre, the one in which it is written: time. Sharing with the reader a detailed week-by-week syllabus, I attempt to show how this combination of elements enables students to come to grips with central issues, themes, and challenging questions that rest at the foundation of the interconnecting elements of virtually any great novelist's work.

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Many professors and students believe that requiring as much as 100 pages a week is too demanding for students who attempt to read fiction in English, let alone who face the challenges of being able to read and analyze it in a foreign language. Nevertheless, I have found that we can help students (re-) capture the power and wonder of the novel by simultaneously involving them in numerous explications of text focusing on verb tenses, adjectives, phrases in apposition, choice of nouns, point of view, elements of space, and so forth and in a mode of scholarship seldom seen today--a present state of studies--that needs merely to focus in an abbreviated manner on one of the most fundamental aspects of the genre, the one in which it is written: time. The primary goal of this article is to share this approach and much of an actual syllabus as a specific example that will allow the reader to evaluate and perhaps adapt as appropriate to his or her own teaching style the exploratory methods proposed. The complete syllabus is available at <http://course-builder.umassd.edu/classes/frn/417/frn417.html>.

Inasmuch as I begin the course with a lecture on major critics' interpretation of time in Emile Zola and require oral reports based on a bibliography on this subject, some readers might be concerned that my approach could emphasize bibliography at the risk of minimizing the students' exposure to great literature. However, I believe in the commanding effectiveness of bibliography and its ability to lend historical lineage, credibility, and justification to our understanding and interpretation of fiction. Moreover, requiring students to examine secondary resources in this manner, to make state-of-studies oral presentations, and to write several explications related to two novels has actually resulted in their becoming far better readers of fiction than in courses where I have guided them through a whirlwind of five, six, or seven novels. I would like to emphasize that I require students to submit all of their written work via my web site and, with my guidance, to be engaged in the reading and evaluation of one another's explications, all in a secure password-protected environment. The three-fold purpose of this collaborative approach is to promote a professional environment of constructive criticism, to encourage responsible, serious and professional commentary, and to make it possible for students to follow up one another's comments and engage in further discussion of the primary and secondary works privately or collectively.

This combination of elements enables students to come to grips with the precise kinds of central issues, themes, and challenging questions that (a) exist at the foundation of the interconnecting elements of virtually any novelist's work, (b) exemplify the richness of different approaches to literature, (c) provide an orientation for two brief lectures from me, numerous explications of text by all of us, and presentations and reviews by them of specific chapters or articles from the "state of studies" bibliography, and (d) the return to which in the many other writers whom we love to read and to teach can expand and heighten the literary experience for all of us; in this regard, I utilize only representative texts, rather than complete works, of additional authors.

The following questions, to which I give several critics' responses in the introductory lecture and which the students further examine in their oral presentations, serve as an organizing structure for the discussion of each week's readings. Not alt of the questions are examined in the same depth at every class meeting, but together they consistently orient our analyses of the novel. (Related questions can be developed for an orientation based on the study of narrative technique, or character development, or the structural and functional manifestation of space, for example, depending on the desired approach of the faculty member.)

1. What terms, phrases, and stylistic features underpin the structure of linear and nonlinear development in conjunction with the multiple points of view found in the novelist's work?

2. What is the effect of an author's construction of paragraphs in successive blocks? Do consecutive paragraphs, scenes and chapters, often representing a different perspective but occupying a coincidental time frame, evoke the same geological or historical time period?

3. Do we as readers dissect one scene at a time, simultaneously enjoying a depth of understanding allowed by our familiarity with a corresponding scene?

4. Since time alone blends the isolated pictures of our reading of a novel into a unified whole, progressing through a series of discontinuous sensations to a structural and temporal coherence among them, to what extent does the linear mythical configuration within the novel impact on the experience of the reader?

5. Are circularity and the myth of eternal return compatible with plot development, which seems to move forward in linear fashion, but also occasionally retrogresses, perhaps searching for its mythical origins?

6. Do a novel's chapters, whether (not) titled or (not) situated in time, depict chains of reiterations? continuity? a continuous and prolonged present capable of configuring myth? Is myth similar to or the opposite of historical escapism?

7. Do the characters, events, and themes of a novel exist only in so far as the novel itself exists? Does the last word of the novel (or even of a chapter) close its time or does the blank space following it leave readers (and at least some characters) open for renewal, reaffirmation, and reinterpretation?

8. What is the relation of a novelist to other thinkers and writers of the time?

To give these questions substance, to keep them focused in the minds of the students, and to illustrate their interrelatedness to other aspects of the novels, I provide the class with a detailed syllabus:

Week 1: Introduction--course conception, bibliography, writing requirements, use of World Wide Web and email, lecture on time, history, and myth in Emile Zola

Week 2: Germinal, Part I (explicate chapters 1 & 6) Zola's depiction of men, women, and things in a single family and precise socio-historical milieu, a corner of nature seen through his individual temperament; similarities and differences between realism and naturalism; discussion of the mimetic aspects of narrative and of the extent to which the author's literary expression of history and human experience constitutes poetic transubstantiations of reality; close reading of Zola's use of technical vocabulary, emphasis on color, impressionist technique of writing, hypertrophy of detail, changing points of view, and descriptive and philosophical evocation of linear and circular conceptions of time and horizontal and vertical space in the novel; relationships between Zola's descriptive techniques and impressionist and surrealist painters' fascination with (in)tangible reality, representation and perception, appreciation of the modern, animism, color, tone, atmosphere, and light

Week 3: Germinal, Part II (explicate chapters 3 & 5) Metaphors of capital versus labor; reification of the workers; doubt, faith, will, and reasoning of the miners and capitalists in the face of the social, political, and economic issues confronting them; comparison with Balzac's realism and distinction between Zola's "morality in action" ("morale en action") and the Balzacian character's "stock exchange value on moral principles" ("morale en actions")

Week 4: Germinal, Part III (explicate chapter 2) Nine-month gestation period of the strike; the fair-day; poverty, corruption, and sexuality; mob psychology; Zola's presumed renunciation of individually developed characters and relationship of this feature to narrative techniques employed by Balzac and by "new novelists" of the 20th century; thematic and narrative functions of Etienne, Rasseneur, and Souvarine; fatalism and determinism; relationships between concrete reality and creative image-making in narration and painting, reconciliation of representation and perception; Daumier, Degas, Monet and Magritte: depictions of the wretched and starving, tangible atmosphere in light, intangible images, visual and verbal descriptions based on or distinct from reality; Zola's "leap into the stars from the trampoline of exact observation; truth takes flight into the realm of the symbol."

Week 5: Germinal, Part IV (explicate chapter 7) Zola's complex, constantly shifting vision of history and class struggle; social and economic dissolution of the miners, consumed by their productivity's lack of rewards or food; fusion of the "two beasts" of labor and capital; evolving meaning of "germinal" in relation to history and myth; links between Zola's descriptive techniques and cinematic techniques; artistic blend of the elements of romanticism, realism, and surrealism

Week 6: Germinal, Part V (explicate chapters 2 & 5) Zola's descriptive techniques on film: selected scenes from Rene Clement's adaptation of L'Assommoir and Renoir's adaptation of La Bete humaine; Explication of the horizontal and vertical dimensions of hell; descriptions of Tartaret and Germinal as a geological novel; mob violence and the vision of an antediluvian revolution evoking geological time; unanimism and the novel

Week 7: Germinal, Part VI (explicate chapter 5) Artistic and temporal blend of elements of romanticism, realism, symbolism, and surrealism; death in every chapter of what Zola described as this "work of pity"; social cooperation, anarchy, and romantic humanitarianism; comparison of descriptive techniques in Germinal and those in representative texts from Le Ventre de Paris, L'Assommoir, and Au Bonheur des Dames 

Week 8: Germinal, Part VII (explicate chapters 5 & 6) The mine, finally wounded and collapsing in its death throes, counter-pointed by the miners, themselves seen as animals, the human figure submerged into the natural; comparison between the novel's opening and closing chapters; the end as beginning; circular linearity; similarities and differences between our interpretations of the work and Zola's own explanation of the novel as revealed in his preparatory manuscripts, correspondence, and newspaper articles; the novel as an example of twentieth-century French "literature of involvement."

Week 9: Lecture on Time & Ennui in the 19th Century Novel. Close readings of selected texts from Rene, La Confession d'un enfant du siecle, Madame Bovary, and Le Rouge et le noir

Week 10: La Peau de chagrin, pp. 58-82 (selected passages for explication) Balzac's prefaces to The Human Comedy and La Peau de chagrin; his "human zoology" and treatment of men, women, and things in relation to morals and manners, character types, Catholicism, and the monarchy, all constituting a material representation of the "thought" of contemporary society; the novel as "la formule de la vie humaine, abstraction faire des individualites ... le point de depart de tout mon ouvrage [... ou] je suivrai les effets de la penske dans la vie." Textual explication of descriptions of the gambling house and the curiosity shop; gambling and speculation, labor and capital, art as art or commodity, and the individual, social order and social repression; geological conception of time; patterns of antithesis and alternation; interrelationship of author, narrator, and reader

Week 11: La Peau de chagrin, pp. 82-125 (selected passages for explication) Balzac's definition of "thought"; parallels among Descartes's "Je pense, donc je suis," Pascal's all-but-stated "Je pense, donc je m'ennuie," Chateaubriand's implied "Je m'ennuie, donc je suis," and the Balzacian dilemma, life-in-death or death-in-life, as developed in his characters' thought, ennui, will, power, and knowledge; Raphael's infernal contract with the skin; close reading of descriptive vocabulary, verb tenses, stylistic features, rhythm, and expressive words in representative passages from Le Pere Goriot, Illusions Perdues, and Eugenie Grandet will highlight temporal and other meanings of the skin and the relationship between the "philosophical studies" and the "social studies" of The Human Comedy

Week 12: La Peau de chagrin, pp. 127-214 (selected passages for explication)

Discussion of the extent to which Balzac practices his theories; journalism, prostitution, and gambling; variations of the Rabelaisian theme of drunkenness with life; role of education vis-a-vis the individual in society; consumption and production in art and economics; "theory of will" and "theory of fortune"; the novel's historical resonance and the characters' discussions of monarchy, freedom, and despotism; Raphael's personal psychology, family, and sexuality; social and economic dissolution of the individual; degree to which language in the novel remains capable of expressing thought and reality; narration and autobiography as art or orgy of words

Week 13: La Peau de chagrin, pp. 214-314 (selected passages for explication) Close thematic relationship of the novel to such contemporary problems as conformity to a deterministic, amoral world in which the individual is reduced to nothingness, the assertion of individuality and the resultant self-destruction as a social being, social responsibility, absolute relativism and subjectivism, divorce of morality from good will, acceptance of materialistic utilitarianism, destruction of ethical universals; time and rhythm as narrative features that are both romantic and realistic; significance of geological imagery of Mont Dore as a foundation for understanding man, art, and history; parallels between descriptions of Mont Dore and Zola's Tartaret; authorial and reader interpretations of Pauline and Foedora; comparison between concluding and opening pages; the beginning as end and the end as beginning;

Week 14: Individual conferences

Week 15: Papers due via web site.

By the end of the semester, the students display a fairly sophisticated grasp of how the novelist looks at the world through a creative screen, even through a kind of magical kaleidoscope that dismembers, deforms and recomposes a reality rendered iridescent. Their attention to bibliography, to the practice of close reading, and to the concept of time as an organizing element has made them genuinely sensitive to the esthetic values of reading and to the magnetic resonance that constitutes the very substance of the novel: narrative technique, character and plot development, conceptions of time and space, and the interrelationship of these various features with the author's vision.

Lewis Kamm, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth 

Dr. Kamm is Chancellor Professor of French Literature and Computer Science and also teaches multidisciplinary honors courses in education and democracy, women's studies, and thinking in the future tense.